Experimenting

If we use Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT or a few other AI models we are using AI that has data centres in the US. If we use Le Chat by Mistral or MyAI (Beta) by Swisscom we are using AI that is based in Europe, or Switzerland. The data stays here.

The first thing to note is that MyAI is in public beta. It is still at a 0.0. version number rather than a 1. something version. As such this means that it can answer questions but we can’t yet give it default data to work with like we can with Claude, Gemini and other AI solutions.

Normally I like to go for a run in the afternoon, after I have had a productive morning. This morning I went for a run first. This afternoon I have to go to an indoor meeting, which doesn’t fill me with euphoria. I feel an e-mail would achieve the same thing within a few minutes. Having said this I have skipped that meeting for three or four years so I feel obligated to go this afternoon.

Yesterday I experimented with NixOS and Debian. I managed to install NixOS on the Pi4 and I managed to implement several changes to the configuration.nix file before the Pi started to overheat and become much slower. At this point I tried to run Debian and that worked.

At first Debian was running in command line mode so I took the time to install the KDE desktop and that’s when I ran into the same limitation of the Pi4. It tends to get hot and slow down to a crawl.

The Raspberry Pi 5 is twice as powerful as previous Pis according to various sources. For the last 24 hours I have been using a Pi 5 running Ubuntu and the experience has been good. Despite being a small computer it feels as comfortable as some of the computers I have been using.

The Pi 5 feels comfortable

I have loaded several webpages at once, in various tabs, tried importing images via photoprism, whilst writing this blog post and running VS Code. So far I feel that a Pi running Ubuntu can run Nextcloud, PhotoPrism and be used to write a blog post simultaneously.

Yesterday I installed Nextcloud on two devices, a raspberry Pi and an HP Elite book and I could see a clear difference between the two machines. The HP is a laptop on which I installed a minimal version of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and I installed a similar version of Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi.

Fast on the HP Elite Book

I believe I used Snap to install Nextcloud and then went to the web interface to configure it automatically by simply creating a user. Within seconds the system was up and running and I was able to upload images, create directories and more. It worked well.

When walking and listening to the 2.5 Admins I heard about the concept of going from treating servers as pets to treating them as cattle. They discussed the habit of giving servers functional names, rather than emotional ones. The examples were similar to DR-1 for for Disaster Recovery one, prod 1 for production one and related names.

Servers as Cattle, Not Pets

They spoke about the legacy habit of building a server up over a period of years to the modern habit of spinning up instances and containers that can easily be replicated within minutes, independent of hardware. They spoke about the need to take notes and set up an environment once, and then destroy it, and set it up again, and to follow the notes exactly. The concept is that you don’t set something up just once, you set it up over and over, and over again, until you have the work flow perfected, and written down, for repeatability, three years down the line.

Today I installed Pi Hole on a Raspberry Pi 3 and configured it so that the router routes traffic through the Pi Hole before returning to the devices on my network. Installing Pi Hole on a Raspberry Pi 3 is relatively straight forward. Find the two or three lines of code, run them, and a minute or two later the device is ready and waiting.

You’re then asked to give the Pi a static IP address, and to modify the DHCP DNS listing so that traffic from the Swisscom router, in my cae, passes through the Pi Hole before arriving at the desired machine. I had to reboot the router to get traffic to go from the router to the Pi Hole and from the Pi Hole to the laptops and mobile phones. I write laptops but I have used just one laptop and mobile phone.

Yesterday I went for a half hour drive to do a favour, but in arriving where I had to do the favour I found that people were deeply focused and did not want to be interrupted so I went for a walk. I didn’t swap to the hiking shoes that were waiting patiently in the car. I wore my “recycled” shoes instead. I eventually regretted this because the ground that was frosty, also had deep puddles of water and I had to walk through them. Two or three times my feet got wet. While getting my feet wet I was also listening to a Linux Podcast, episode 56 of Linux After Dark and they were discussing whether people like to adopt a system and stick with it, or whether they like to experiment and try new things constantly.

Yesterday, out of curiousity I experimented. I charged both the Garmin Instinct Solar and the Garmin 45s with a solar panel. The first thing I noticed is that they were using 0.1 amps to charge, rather than 1, 2 or more amps of power. Until this experiment I had never considered how small batteries for gps watches are.

200 mah

According to a Google search the battery capacity of GPS watches is around 200mah. That’s tiny compared to the amount of power mobile phones and other devices have. This means that it’s easy to recharge the batteries on wathes like the Instinct, as long as you have a larger external panel or even a relatively low power external battery.

Every day or two I see people post about how the Fediverse should be simplified to welcome new people. It’s a shame. Signing up for a Fediverse server is easy. It’s the same process as for every site. The biggest difference is that you’re signing up for a privately owned, crowd sourced community instance. The instances vary slightly from mastodon to Firefish to ClassicPress to WordPress but at their core they are the same. It’s just the community that changes, but even that can be the same if you migrate from one instance to another.